Thomas Friedman famously announced that the world is flat in his 2005 book of that name; he was writing about globalization. In Friedman's view, VoIP, file sharing, and wireless were the "steroids" that have accelerated the flattening of global commerce. Today I'd add video over Internet, which has become more and more prevalent as bandwidth has improved.

The two leaders in business Web conferencing are Cisco WebEx and Citrix GoToMeeting. Other products in the field include Adobe Connect, Drum ShareAnywhere, Join.me, and Zoom. Of course, I’m leaving a few out, in at least one case as a kindness to the vendor. (They hate it when I leave them out; they really hate it when I tear their product to shreds.)